Philip Hodgetts’ unique blend of business and production knowledge gives him insight into the current state of the industry, and a remarkably accurate look forward. Here he shares his thinking, and points to articles of interest from other sites, with context as to why they're interesting.

CAT | HTML5

JavaScript video technology only 17 years in the making http://t.co/t1FCSNf7 Not sure why this is relevant, but you might have an idea!

Yes, the lack of need for a browser plug-in is good, but that’s the role of HTML5 which has largely standardized on H.264/MP4 (thank goodness). It will be hard to win against the momentum behind HTML5 and frankly I’d prefer there not to be another alternative, now that we have finally got something like a standard.

Personally, I think this is an interesting technology looking for a reason to exist. I find the claims of “90% less bandwidth” to be suspect at best, and the company provides no details on their site (that I could find).

Thank Goodness, sanity finally prevails! In fact Mozilla’s previous approach – holding out for Ogg or WebM codecs – had the unfortunate side effect of driving even more people to the very closed Flash for distribution of H.264 in FireFox. Exactly the opposite of what the Mozilla folk wanted.

I’ve long said that H.264 is “one codec to rule them all” (because it scales so well) and it’s about time Mozilla realized that the world really only wants one codec. Well, really users just don’t want to care about codecs at all!

Moving forward, Adobe will offer customers the ability to make, manage, measure and monetize content and applications across all devices. The company has long been the leader in content authoring solutions with its Adobe Creative Suite® product franchise. Its Digital Media growth strategy revolves around its recently announced Creative Cloud and will enable the company to rapidly deliver new product capabilities and services; penetrate untapped market segments; and increase overall engagement with customers.

After a slow start – and still controversy over exactly what format video will be supported in “HTML5” – is the Flash era finally over?

Colleen Taylor writing for GigOm discusses recent data on HTML5 and how Apple’s position on HTML5 and Flash has – as I predicted several years back – pushed the adoption of HTML5.

As is often the case in business, where there’s a winner, there’s usually a loser. HTML5 could largely replace Abobe’s proprietary Flash technology. And HTML5′s swift ascent could render Flash irrelevant in short order. “I think the disappearance of Flash is closer than people think,” ABI senior analyst Mark Beccue said in a press release accompanying the data.

HTML5′s projected growth is all the more impressive considering that the actual standard is not officially expected to be completed until 2020 2014, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards body. But that won’t stop companies and independent engineers from developing and deploying HTML5 features now, ABI said.

Full HTML5 interoperability isn’t expected until 2014 but we’re already a long way in, and will get further thanks to, somewhat ironically, Adobe. I’ve long advocated that Adobe were in the best position to create an HTML5 authoring tool, and indeed they have now shown one in Adobe Labs – Edge. AppleInsider has a first look at Edge.

[Update] One day later Flixmaster launched another HTML5 authoring tool

I’ve long had a preference for open standards over those from a single vendor, and so I like seeing formerly “Flash Only” features being replicated in ever-smarter ‘HTML5’ players.

Until now, the lack of true fullscreen playback has been the biggest limitation of HTML5 over Flash video. Safari already offered a basic fullscreen option for HTML5 video players, but this was via a non-customizable QuickTime view that didn’t allow the player to be branded or to feature custom controls.

Since HTML5 is the combination of a few new html tags (predominantly the audio, video and canvas tags) with JavaScript for the interaction, JavaScript is very important to the future of the web, web applications and a browser-based world.

What makes a language useful is some combination of the language’s expressiveness and the libraries and tools available. JavaScript clearly passed the expressiveness barrier a long time ago, even if the ceremony required for creating objects is distasteful. But recently, we’ve seen some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5. JavaScript may have been a perfectly adequate language in the past, but these changes (and a few others that I’ll point out) have made JavaScript a language that is essential for every developer to know. If there’s one language you need to learn in the next year, it’s JavaScript.

If this is your beat, the article is well worth reading. If you’re not that technical, keep in mind that HTML5 is largely about JavaScript, which is getting faster and more flexible all the time!

In the time that MeFeedia has been tracking H.264 for HTML5 video on the web, the numbers have grown from 10% in Jan 2010, to 63% in Feb 2011. That’s a huge boost for H.264 as the message gets out. It’s not good news for WebM, which frankly is only going to take off if Google does something incredibly stupid like making YouTube WebM only. (I doubt it since they have a contract for H.264 versions with Apple, it would appear.)

One of the things that has worried me about VP8/WebM is that Google has refused to indemnify users from patent issues. To me that’s a huge worry, and now MPEG-LA has started the process of establishing whether or not VP8 does (or does not) infringe any of its members’ patents.